With `argparse`, I'm providing a triple-quoted string via the `description` argument of the constructor.  When I invoke the script with the -h or --help argument, all formatting in the triple-quoted string is lost, i.e., all paragraphs are run together into one giant paragraph, and the result is rather hard to read.

Phillip M. Feldman

You would need to use the RawTextHelpFormatter as format_class for the constructor. In this case, argparse will apply no re-wrapping of the description.

import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="""foo
bar
baz""", formatter_class=argparse.RawTextHelpFormatter)

That works.  Thanks!

I think that this boils down to a documentation issue.  The following says
that the default behavior is to line-wrap the help messages.  At least to
me, this doesn't imply that whitespace is getting eaten.

RawDescriptionHelpFormatter
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#argparse.RawDescriptionHelpFormatter>
and RawTextHelpFormatter
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#argparse.RawTextHelpFormatter>
give more control over how textual descriptions are displayed. By default,
ArgumentParser
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#argparse.ArgumentParser>
objects line-wrap the description
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#description> and epilog
<https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html#epilog> texts in
command-line help messages:

On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 12:43 PM, Zsolt Cserna <report@bugs.python.org>
wrote:

>
> Zsolt Cserna <cserna.zsolt@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
> You would need to use the RawTextHelpFormatter as format_class for the
> constructor. In this case, argparse will apply no re-wrapping of the
> description.
>
> import argparse
>
> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="""foo
> bar
> baz""", formatter_class=argparse.RawTextHelpFormatter)
>
> ----------
> nosy: +csernazs
>
> _______________________________________
> Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
> <https://bugs.python.org/issue34299>
> _______________________________________
>